by T. F. Powys
‘What the bloody hell be ’ee doin’ to thik maid?’
There happened to be two females that the drover had for some time past kept in his mind’s eye. One of them was ‘she’ whom he had beaten and who had a week or two later gone ‘thud,’ and the other was the maid to whom he had given his gold in order that the one called ‘she’ might not haunt him. In the girl lying there upon the rough gravel so near to the tramp, the drover recognized the maid that he had once carried to her home after pouring his gold into her lap. She looked in much the same doleful state now, only instead of a homely elm shedding its leaves from above, a huge man overshadowed her.
The fear of his former mistress had become a moving spirit in the brute mind of the drover. Night or day, he knew that wherever he went, she was with him. After Neville died he expected at any moment to see her bruised body, with the scar by the lip, moving beside him. He still had the words of the priest, like a shield, before him, and when a cow would not go the right way he withheld his hand from beating her, and twas often damned by he farmer who employed him for not hurrying his charges along the road faster. Ever since his visit to Neville his life had been a marked life. His old brute nature was there still, nothing could alter that, but there was something there with it that gave a new tone to his life—a sense of unnaturalness about himself had appeared, a feeling that he was being guided, a distinct prod from somewhere else. He now knew what a cow felt like when it is being driven by an unknown purchaser into a new pasture. In the tavern brawls, in the market rows, the fear of ‘she’ was a cloak over his tongue.
But now, beholding the maid whom he had once, following the priest’s counsel, befriended, so foully used—for he had seen the tramp drag her to the pit—he snatched at the idea that ‘she’ had this once loosened his chain, and was throbbing at him inside to revenge. The cow ceased to look at Mr. Tasker. Seeing her driver walking away from her, she lay down.
The tramp stood beside his prey, that seemed now very poor and worthless carrion. Mr. Tasker’s father had no wish to give up the event that the darkness and the pond had put in his way.
In the wild moan and creak of the clump of trees, in the dim gathering darkness, there was formed again out of the mouth of the drover words:
‘What the bloody, blasted hell, be ’ee doin’ to thik maid?’
Receiving no reply to his polite inquiry, the drover began to draw nearer to the two, slowly moving round the pit.
Mr. Tasker’s father was generous in his temper. There was no needless jealousy in his way of life. He was willing to share, in a friendly way, his spoils with a friend, when he could see his own safety and pleasure in that line of conduct. The situation of himself and the girl had become, by the advent of the other figure, one of sharing. He met the arrival from the other side with the suggestion, delivered in mild language, that they, one after the other, might obey their profound elemental instinct, and then vanish quite decently into the night. The girl could, if she wished to, walk into the pond.
The generous offer produced no response. The drover’s mind could not be led by more than one idea at a time. He was aware just then of a direct impulse from ‘she’ to throw Mr. Tasker’s father into the deep end of the water. His brute nature had taken another line from that of the tramp’s and had gone back for it just as far. It was perfectly natural that two brutes should struggle over a fallen female, but with these two the naturalness was not complete, because the drover, taking his orders from ‘she’ was there as the deliverer. The convenient suggestion that Mr. Tasker’s father met him with, had the effect of making the voice of ‘she’ sound in him like a war trumpet. He advanced towards the tramp with a perfectly plain mission in his mind, and with as good a will to victory as ever Christian had shown to Apollyon.
Mr. Tasker’s father, unwilling to let his victim go without giving her something at least to remember him by, bent his form down almost to cover her and struck a heavy blow at her upturned face with his fist, enjoying the satisfaction of seeing her blood before he turned to meet the drover.
The drover went at Mr. Tasker’s father as his old dog would have done. He went at his throat, and seized it after having first delivered a well-placed blow with his fist. Before two minutes were past the tramp found himself rolled, kicked, beaten, and at last shoved into the deep end of the pond. Thence he crawled out, some minutes later, taken rather aback at this ending to his plans, and went his ways.
The drover, having won the battle, turned to see what had happened to the girl. She was lying in just the same place where the tramp had left her.
There were two creatures for the drover to deal with that night, the girl and the cow. It would be awkward for him if ‘she’ met him driving the cow, having left the maid to her fate.
The drover carried water from the pit and bathed the girl’s face as tenderly as though she were a new-born lamb, while the gusty winter’s night closed in about them. What was the next thing that ‘she’ meant him to do? The night was there, the cow, himself and the maid. He could not take up his stick and walk away from the other two, and it was not likely that every heath cottage he took her to would prove to be her home. Besides, there was the cow. She had to be driven to a Shelton farm, and Shelton was a good six miles away.
The drover considered. About half-way to Shelton, on the heath, there was, he knew, a cottage. He had stopped there a few days back for water, and a lady had given him a cup of tea. He would have to pass that cottage on the road to Shelton. But how to get both cow and Alice that far? He took up the tramp’s tin and walked over to the cow. The first need of a sick calf is milk. With one or two knowing prods he induced the cow to rise. He filled the tin with milk, carried it to the girl, and slowly fed her.
At the moment when Alice was drinking the milk, the man who had been permitted to give her a place in the world was returning home to his tea from the stable. Mr. Allen moved slowly, with his head held sideways and his cap drawn over his face because of the wind. Under his cap he was smiling. The farmer had given him a waistcoat. This gift had been brought to him in the stable, the result of the carter’s many hints while following the plough. He now tenderly bore it towards his home.
After kicking his boot against the sill of the door to loosen the mud, Mr. Allen entered the house. He sat in his chair before the table and looked at the lamp, and his eyes half closed like a bat’s. He sat for half an hour. Certain moving, sometimes speaking, figures who were in the habit of putting his food before him did not come. Time passed. Another thirty minutes completed the hour. Then some one opened the back door. It was Mrs. Allen, who came in from the neighbour’s, and, as was perfectly natural, she began to make a noise, crying, moaning, ejaculating, wringing her hands, and enjoying all the excitements of a mother’s feelings.
‘What had she done or said to make Alice run away?’ And she considered the different ways by which a young girl can end her life. She pictured herself, the sobbing, bereaved centre of attraction at the inquest, kissing the Book.
While all this telling of the story was proceeding from his wife, Alice’s father was still smiling at the lamp. Perceiving that the noise from the woman near him had quieted a little, he very tenderly took from under his coat the soiled waistcoat. He held it out in the light and brushed it with his hand. Smoothing it down, he noticed the name of the maker on the buttons. Then he laid it very carefully on the table.
The wife, bringing her mind from her daughter’s coffin to her husband’s waistcoat, stooped over the table to touch the precious gift. The farmer’s present reminded her of her husband’s tea. They ate, and after the meal she was pleasantly aware that the usual three slices of bread that Alice would have eaten were still attached to the loaf. The loaf had not diminished like the one she had cut from at the last meal.
Far out on the heath, Alice was able to sit up, revived by the drink of warm milk from the tin can. The drover had defeated the tramp, but there was now the night to deal with. From the scudding black clouds fel
l a dozen wind-driven splashes of rain, that stung and bit the face, telling of more and worse to follow. Attached to the cow’s head was a rope. There usually was a rope on a driven cow’s neck, but the drover’s mind struggled dimly with some other recollection, of a cow in a picture with a rope on its neck.
Slowly his mind pieced together, himself, as a little boy, being hustled out into the night by a great red-armed mother. He was sent to beg for dinner at the ivy-covered parsonage at Old Stoke, two miles from his parents’ dwelling. While the dinner was being put into a basket, the cook sat the little dirty boy beside the kitchen table, washed his hands, and gave him a large picture Bible, that she took from beside the tall clock, to look at. The first picture he had seen had been a cow being led by an old man with a light on his head instead of a hat. Riding on the cow was a very grand lady holding a smiling baby. For fifty years the picture had been hidden somewhere in the mind of the drover. Now he remembered it quite well—as well as the two lumps of sugar that he had stolen when the cook turned her back to him.
He now went up to the cow. It had not moved from the place where he had milked it. He led it by the rope up to Alice and put her upon its back, where she held on as best she could. Through the blinding rain and driving gusts they trudged, taking another path from that by which Alice had come. At the rate of about a mile an hour, they at last reached the heath cottage about half an hour after Henry had been driven there by his vision.
Tying the cow to Molly Neville’s little garden gate, the drover carried the dripping girl, almost dead with cold, to the cottage door and knocked. Henry was asleep upon her sofa, and Molly naturally wondered what other guest the winds had sent her that night. The drover told his story. He had found the girl on the heath, and had brought her there with the help of his cow.
He now promised to call out the doctor on his way to Shelton, so that Alice received proper attention during the miscarriage that her despair had brought her to.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE LOST SOUND
THE flight of Henry caused a comparatively slight ruffle in the home circle. Dr. George had, at that point, taken over command. The day after the funeral he carried Mrs. Turnbull off, explaining to her that Henry was staying with a farmer on the heath, who had kindly accepted his help for sowing the early spring wheat.
The Rev. John had duly seen to the selling of the furniture. He directed the auctioneer to forward the cheque to his mother.
Mrs. Turnbull hardly understood, at the time of leaving, what was happening. Some one had taken away her jam-pots—and why was she to go for this ride in a motor car? Any morning that old creaking sound might reappear, and she not there to hear the study door open, and her husband go upstairs to wash his hands.
At last, this new move upon her, she did try to understand. She was, she knew now, to go and live with her son George. She remembered how the baby George had screamed for two or three days after the monthly nurse had left. And she remembered the groans ‘the sound’ had made because the babe had kept him awake in the night. What a soft, round, chubby face George had had then, and how he used to nestle up to her breasts! She appealed to him about her jam-pots: ‘might she be allowed to carry them with her to his house—would he mind taking them?’
She asked her question timidly, as a girl of ten would who wants to be allowed to wash her doll’s clothes. Her son answered her very seriously, as though he had obtained his answer from the churchyard. He explained to her very carefully that it might harm his practice for jam-pots, empty ones, to be unladen from his car into his house, under the very eyes, perhaps, of a patient.
The jam-pots were, in consequence of this mandate, placed in two old clothes-baskets and sold at the auction, the two lots being placed together and bringing one shilling.
Mrs. Turnbull settled at the doctor’s, performed her duty, her profound and ever-recurring duty, of writing cheques for her board. She did this every week on Monday morning. Nearly always she was to be found in her own room, for when she stayed downstairs she was forced to watch the busy thin features of her son’s wife, who arranged and tidied up and down the front rooms, just as though each room were a cross old woman who had to be tidied and petted into a good humour.
Everything that went on in her son’s household was ruled by the totally featureless tyrant of convention. Every little detail was arranged so that the way of life of the doctor’s family should reflect, as in a glass, the manners and customs of the middle order of the people whom he attended. The maid was taught just the tone to use to the front-door bell ringer, and the right way to speak to a farmer’s servant-girl who came to the back to have a tooth out.
It looked as if the art of torture was brought very near perfection in this quiet way of living, the soul being set upon the rack so that the body might have a balance of three figures in the bank.
No one understood the doctor’s virtue better than himself. When he stayed for ten minutes with a dying patient while the nurse went to the shop, his charity, his kindness to the poor, would not, he felt, be ever forgotten in that household. Neither was it, until he sent in his bill. Once Dr. George even went so far as to speak to a farmer about the overcrowding of one of his cottages, where two little girls slept in a closed cupboard, to come out in the morning, dazed and stupid, like white owls at noon. The doctor felt that that time his goodness had carried him a little too far, because the farmer taught him to mind his own business by giving his custom, available after an occasional drunk, to his rival.
The doctor’s plan of life was formed before his marriage, his wife and daughter were a part and parcel of it, and now his mother and her cheques must fit in too. Mrs. Turnbull tried to be good. She tried very hard to fit herself in. Being an old mother, she thought that she might help with the child. One afternoon she read a fairy story to her granddaughter, a story that she had herself loved.
‘How silly, Granny!’ was the reply to the story. ‘Dad says that that sort of writing is all tommyrot. Have you begun to save up for my bicycle yet?’
Mrs. Turnbull had a place by her son at meals. At other times she sat in her little room with her darning on her lap. She missed something. She could not exactly tell what it was. Something of her old life, something that was nearly connected with ‘the sound’ that had so strangely died away, taking with it her home. Always she sat still and looked at the strange view from her window. What were those great beech trees doing there? Where were the round, chipped laurels that she had always seen? Where was the keeper’s wood? What had happened to those homely noises—‘Funeral’s’ voice heard in the kitchen over a cup of tea that Edith,—kind, ever kind Edith—had given him? And the man who milked the cows by the hedge? Where were the cows gone?
What she heard now were the proper movements in a well-ordered house, but these sounds awoke no response in her heart. The maid could go on dusting; even in her own room while she sat there, the fact never stirred her. In her life with him the dusting was not done like that, and her gardener had never been a smart young man who understood motor cars. And why was not dear Henry there, taking up his odds and ends of books, looking out into the garden, with one book closed on his knee with his hand upon it, while ‘the sound’ in the big chair read prayers?
She had been for so many years looking around her at the things her own form and life had created, and now the very sounds and voices of the earth were changed. What was it, she wondered, that she especially missed? Not ‘the sound’; not dear Henry’s thoughtful look into the garden, nor his quiet movements as he tended the flowers; neither was it the click of the drive gate when ‘the sound’ came in from the village. One day she knew. She found in her mind her lost child.
It was summer, and below her, in the doctor’s kitchen garden, there was something shining red amongst the leaves, and white flowers. Yes, there the strawberry was, and she, old broken-hearted woman, dared to make one trembling last effort to boil jam! She went out into the garden, forgetting her bonnet, and picked a basketf
ul of the coveted fruit. She carried it into the kitchen and looked toward the range. There was no fire. The cook had let it go out, and had gone herself into the village. Leaving the basket of strawberries on the table, Mrs. Turnbull slowly made her way upstairs, and sat in her chair, holding her handkerchief to her eyes, crying like a child.
It happened once more, later in the summer, that her old desire took hold of her again, and brought upon her a rebuke from her son. She had been for a walk to the other end of the village. On the way home she saw in the village street two stone jam-pots, thrown out by some unthrifty woman, ‘only,’ as Mrs. Turnbull feelingly said, ‘to get them broken.’ She bent down and took the pots out of the dust and carried them, one in each hand, all the way up the village, showing, so her son politely told her, ‘the common vulgarity of her mind to all the world.’
As she was not allowed to make jam, she spent nearly all the hours of the day in darning stockings for the family, which was the only kind of mending that her son’s wife would let her do. She had once tried to mend Lorna’s, her little granddaughter’s, summer coat, but she had only made the rent worse, and her daughter-in-law had been forced, in the midst of a busy day, to unpick the stitches and do the work all over again. So she could only be trusted to darn stockings, wondering all the time why there was nothing now that belonged to her in life. She could never more touch the simple realities of coming and going, now that ‘the sound’ was hidden away. A white patch, where the paper had been torn away from her vicarage drawing-room wall, was more to her than all the new primness of her son’s house.
Look as she might about her, she could find nothing, nothing that reflected her as she really was. Her needle would not take the same way as it was wont to do when it laid a woollen line across a vacant space in the heel of a stocking. When the turn came, instead of going in and out across the first row of lines, the long foolish needle took up two or three threads at a time, making a disordered knot instead of her usual neat patch. Mrs. Turnbull would sit for hours bending her head over her work and wondering why, instead of neatness, there was confusion. She could nowhere obtain the strength wherewith to break the spell that those long years with him had cast over her. The air of her son’s house was too clean and simple and varnished for her to breathe. She missed the thicker, heavier air that she had been used to with him.